Titanfall 2 isn’t native 4K on PS4 Pro, but has a more stable frame rate and resolution

Titanfall 2 is one of the first games to take advantage of the increased power of the PS4 Pro — it launches a fortnight before the updated console — and the key improvement is all about frame rate. Executive producer Drew McCoy confirmed to Stevivor it won’t run native 4K, as we expected, but does benefit from a more stable 60 frames-per-second.

“It’s not native 4K and I would be surprised if anyone saw native 4K with AAA level games any time soon,” said McCoy. “It just takes so much processing power. It’s unbelievable amounts of just GPU grunt to do that [native 4K].

All console versions of Titanfall 2 across Xbox One, PS4 and PS4 Pro feature resolution scaling to keep the frame rate as close to 60FPS as possible. The extra power of the PS4 Pro enables it to keep the frame rate more stable whilst maintaining a higher resolution.

“It’s a PS4 that’s faster. We’re able to increase the resolution, we have high-res shadows, and maybe higher particle counts. The frame rate is more stable; we have dynamic resolution scaling on all consoles, but it scales down less often on PS4 Pro to maintain 60 frames-per-second.”

Despite its status as one of the first games to take advantage of the PS4 Pro at launch, Respawn didn’t know about it long before the official announcement. It always intended to support the new hardware, but wasn’t ready to show something with Sony’s announcement due to the short lead time.

“We did not get much of a heads up, like most people,” said McCoy. “So we didn’t get a tonne of time. Like no one even knew about it until….I don’t even know, but it was late. Since it’s just the PS4, but faster, it’s really not that hard to say ‘when running on PS4 do this, and when running on PS4 Pro do that.’

“Because we also made the PC version, we have some nobs we can tweak, so we just spent some time making sure it still runs well and looks good on PS4 Pro. You know, making sure it doesn’t look any worse at all. That’s the requirement: it can’t run any worse or look worse than on PS4. So it runs better, looks better and has no bugs on PS4 Pro.

“We definitely wanted it to be [on PS4 Pro]. When you’re making a AAA game, you want to be seen as a AAA game, and what kind of big budget game is not going to be seen on PS4 Pro? You really want to be up there. So when Sony did the unveiling, we just weren’t ready to have something to show yet. I was on phone calls with them, but the schedules didn’t line up.”

Ben is an Australian games writer and pioneer in the use of the term "current-gen" to actually refer to the current-generation of consoles. He joined the Stevivor team in 2016 and has been to E3 five times, but can't really remember any of them. Gamertag / PSN ID: Gryllis.